The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to graph representation and, more specifically, to node positioning within stratified graph representations based upon attributes of represented objects.
At least some known graph drawing tools are designed to implement graph drawing algorithms that can either import or receive from a user interactively sets of properties for nodes that are relevant to their display in a visual representation of the graph. For example, a label or text for a node may be imported or specified by a user interactively, and the size of a name might influence the size of one or more of the nodes. As another example, dimensions, color, and perhaps positioning requirements might be specified by a user or imported. These node properties influence the drawing of the graph.
However, these properties do not necessarily reflect the nature of the objects represented by nodes directly. For example, a graph might be generated wherein nodes represent employees within a company. The data representing employees might specify a number of properties about each employee, such as name, department, education level, seniority, position, and so on. At least some texts that present graph drawing algorithms do not present algorithms that directly access such information stored about node objects. A user might specify positioning requirements, or labels or text based upon any number of such properties, and might further specify them programmatically; however, the algorithm for placing the nodes within a drawing does not directly consider information stored about the objects themselves.